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Predicting “it will work for us”: (way) beyond statistics

Nancy Cartwright

In Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo & Jon Williamson (eds.), Causality in the Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press (2011)

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The Confounding Question of Confounding Causes in Randomized Trials.Jonathan Fuller - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3):901-926.details It is sometimes thought that randomized study group allocation is uniquely proficient at producing comparison groups that are evenly balanced for all confounding causes. Philosophers have argued that in real randomized controlled trials this balance assumption typically fails. But is the balance assumption an important ideal? I run a thought experiment, the CONFOUND study, to answer this question. I then suggest a new account of causal inference in ideal and real comparative group studies that helps clarify the roles of confounding (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 13 citations
Correlational Data, Causal Hypotheses, and Validity.Federica Russo - 2011 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (1):85 - 107.details A shared problem across the sciences is to make sense of correlational data coming from observations and/or from experiments. Arguably, this means establishing when correlations are causal and when they are not. This is an old problem in philosophy. This paper, narrowing down the scope to quantitative causal analysis in social science, reformulates the problem in terms of the validity of statistical models. Two strategies to make sense of correlational data are presented: first, a 'structural strategy', the goal of which (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 11 citations
Establishing Causal Claims in Medicine.Jon Williamson - 2019 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 32 (1):33-61.details Russo and Williamson put forward the following thesis: in order to establish a causal claim in medicine, one normally needs to establish both that the putative cause and putative effect are appropriately correlated and that there is some underlying mechanism that can account for this correlation. I argue that, although the Russo-Williamson thesis conflicts with the tenets of present-day evidence-based medicine, it offers a better causal epistemology than that provided by present-day EBM because it better explains two key aspects of (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 26 citations
Public health policy, evidence, and causation: lessons from the studies on obesity.Federica Russo - 2012 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 15 (2):141-151.details The paper addresses the question of how different types of evidence ought to inform public health policy. By analysing case studies on obesity, the paper draws lessons about the different roles that different types of evidence play in setting up public health policies. More specifically, it is argued that evidence of difference-making supports considerations about ‘what works for whom in what circumstances’, and that evidence of mechanisms provides information about the ‘causal pathways’ to intervene upon. Download Export citation Bookmark 6 citations
Evidential pluralism and evidence of mechanisms in the social sciences.Derek Beach - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8899-8919.details Is evidential pluralism possible when we move to the social sciences, and if so, to what degree? What are the analytical benefits? The answer put forward in this article is that there is a tradeoff between how serious social science methodologies take the study of mechanisms and the analytical benefits that flow from evidential pluralism. In the social sciences, there are a range of different approaches to studying mechanisms, differentiated by the degree to which the ‘process’ is unpacked theoretically, and (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 2 citations
(1 other version)Socioeconomic processes as open-ended results. Beyond invariance knowledge for interventionist purposes.Leonardo Ivarola - 2017 - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 32 (2):211-229.details In this paper a critique to philosophical approaches that presuppose invariant knowledge for policy purposes is carried out. It is shown that socioeconomic processes do not fit to the logic of stable causal factors, but they are more suited to the logic of "open-ended results". On the basis of this ontological variation it is argued that ex-ante interventions are not appropriate in the socioeconomic realm. On the contrary, they must be understood in a “dynamic” sense. Finally, derivational robustness analysis is (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 3 citations

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